The RoboEarth project was initiated by a multi-disciplinary partnership of robotics researchers from academia and industry. Their goals:

- to prove that connection to a networked information repository greatly speeds up the learning and adaptation process that allows robotic systems to perform complex tasks, and
- to show that a system connected to such a repository will be capable of autonomously carrying out useful tasks that were not explicitly planned for at design time.

In December 2009, the group received four-year funding from the European Commission's Cognitive Systems and Robotics Initiative to develop RoboEarth's open-source network database platform and develop a series of demonstrators to prove the concept.